Faraday Technology, a contract microchip developer, has announced plans to develop one of the world’s first 64-core processors based on Arm Neoverse. The chip will be manufactured by Intel’s contract manufacturing division using the advanced 18A (1.8 nm) manufacturing process.
The 64-core Arm Neoverse system-on-chip (SoC) will be designed for a range of applications, including large data centers, edge systems, and advanced 5G networks, according to Faraday. The chip will also incorporate various interface IPs from the Arm Total Design ecosystem, with probable inclusions of PCIe, CXL, and DDR5 interfaces.
It’s noteworthy that Faraday will not sell the processor per se. They will instead offer the chip design to their clients for customization. While there’s no confirmation on any potential buyers, it seems Faraday has confidence in Arm Neoverse cores. The chips will be produced by Intel Foundry Services (IFS) using the Intel 18A process and could arguably be among the first server Arm processors rolled out by IFS.
Intel Foundry Services currently has several data center chip orders, including a cloud system chip for Intel 3 process, a custom server chip for Ericsson, and Intel 18A-based-chips for the U.S. Department of Defense. Intel also packages ‘system-in-package’ for Amazon Web Services data centers.
Faraday is strategically poised for cutting-edge technology nodes as a design partner under Arm Total Design to meet the rising demand of future applications, said Steve Wang, CEO of Faraday. We’re excited to announce the development of our new SoC platform based on Arm Neoverse using Intel 18A technology. This will benefit our ASIC and DIS (Design Implementation Service) customers by accelerating their time of market entry for data center and high-performance computing applications.
We’re pleased to collaborate with Faraday on the development of an SoC based on Arm Neoverse using our highly competitive Intel 18A technological process, said Stuart Pann, senior vice-president of Intel and general manager of IFS. This strategic alliance with Faraday demonstrates our commitment to integrating technical and manufacturing innovations into the global semiconductor supply chain, thus enabling Faraday’s clients to readily meet global power and performance standards for SoC.
Notably, Intel Foundry Services and Arm announced a collaboration on mobile SoC using Intel 18A technology in April 2023. While the agreement hasn’t borne fruits yet, at least one contract chip developer is interested in entering the market for data centers with Arm Neoverse and Intel 18A.
